by Ada Calhoun
“Despite their growing influence and responsibilities at work, Gen Xers are most overlooked for promotion and have been the slowest to advance,” according to consulting firm DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2018,¹⁶ which reported, too, that Gen X leaders are “under-recognized” and “typically expected to take on heavy workloads.” The result: demoralization. A 2019 MetLife survey found that Gen X employees were notable for having “less enthusiasm for purpose in the workplace than other generations.”¹⁷
One bright spot in the post–Great Recession world: while many industries are convulsing: jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) are proliferating.¹⁸ However, women held only 26 percent of STEM positions in 2011. That number was even lower for women of color: only 6 percent of STEM workers, male and female, were black. According to the 2018 Women in the Workplace report from Leanin.org and McKinsey and Company, corporate America has made almost no progress on gender diversity in the past four years.¹⁹ Women’s presence as a percentage in computer occupations has actually declined since the 1990s.²⁰
When I asked Eileen Appelbaum, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, whether Gen X women’s fear that they have no job stability is based on reality rather than paranoia, she said: “It’s not psychological.”²¹ Over the last three decades, in Appelbaum’s words,²² “the structure of firms has undergone a major evolution … [Companies have] outsourced many of the tasks previously performed in-house or by subsidiaries.”
There seems no end to ways in which the changing economy has been bad for workers who look to settle into management slots in midlife: offshore production, unions losing power, deregulation, automation.²³
In the wake of the Great Recession, long-term unemployment hit older women harder than any other group. Headlines confirm our worst suspicions. Harvard Business Review: OLDER WOMEN ARE BEING FORCED OUT OF THE WORKFORCE.²⁴ PBS NewsHour: WHY WOMEN OVER 50 CAN’T FIND JOBS.²⁵ The New York Times: FOR WOMEN IN MIDLIFE, CAREER GAINS SLIP AWAY.²⁶
As of this writing, unemployment has just hit a new low.²⁷ But age discrimination is real: A recent New York Times–Pro Publica investigation found that Facebook job ads were not showing up on the pages of people over a certain age, because the site let potential employees target younger demographics for their ads. When Verizon sought recruits for a financial planning and analysis unit, the ad went out to people ages twenty-five to thirty-six.²⁸ Older users never saw it.
A recent lawsuit against the media company Meredith highlighted the age disparity in men and women on TV news. In five years, the company removed seven female anchors with an average age of 46.8 and replaced them with younger women, whose average age was 38.1. Meanwhile, male anchors remain a decade older, on average, than their female coanchors.²⁹
Many of the country’s highest-profile CEOs are in their thirties and forties—so if that’s your dream, you’re likely to sense your window of opportunity rapidly closing. The woe trickles down: if you are in the corporate world at a time when everyone in management seems to be in their thirties, and you’re in your forties and not there yet, what can you look forward to?
We expect ourselves to be further ahead, faster, even after entering the workforce at a historic disadvantage. The ominous term “downsizing” invaded American speech in a solidly Gen X birth year: 1976.³⁰
“If twentysomethings entered the decade floundering in the job market, did they deserve to be labeled dazed and confused?” wrote Margot Hornblower in Time in 1997.³¹ “They had come of age after the U.S. took what some economists call the great U-turn. Energy prices first soared in 1973, and workers’ wages stagnated. Between 1979 and 1995, some forty-three million jobs were lost through corporate downsizing. Newly created jobs paid less and offered fewer benefits.”
Now Gen X women find themselves competing in middle age with both younger and older workers. In 2011, the Center for Work-Life Policy called Gen X the “wrong place, wrong time” generation: “thwarted by boomers who can’t afford to retire and threatened by the prospect of leap-frogging Millennials.”³²
Gen X journalist Ann Sterzinger wrote on Medium that, after she got into the game, the rules changed: “We watched as the standard age for a reporter went from ten years older than we were to ten years younger in the space of five years.”³³
Gen Xers often see their bosses pursuing Millennials for any job that involves social media.³⁴ One woman in California told me younger employees in her office were given social-media responsibilities that she had coveted:³⁵ “There’s an idea that because I’m fifty-two I won’t know about social media. I actually know a butt load. I had to help my kids navigate it.”
Hoping to advance against the odds, Gen X women read books like Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In or Mika Brzezinski’s Knowing Your Value and flock to classes and seminars about corporate life. I went to one in 2018: the Catalyst Conference in New York City, a series of workshops and lectures and panels at the Hilton in midtown Manhattan, designed to inspire and support professional women. Catalyst is an advocacy group that conducts research on women and the workplace. At this conference were many well-groomed women in their forties wearing pantsuits and nodding when speakers used corporate jargon to flatter them as “intentional change-makers.”
Carla Harris, vice chairman, managing director, and senior client adviser at Morgan Stanley, a thirty-year veteran of Wall Street, gave one of the keynote speeches at Catalyst. Wearing a glittery silver jacket and black pants, short hair and statement jewelry, she dispensed “Carla’s pearls” of wisdom about powerful leadership. Beneath the ballroom’s pink and gold ceiling lights, she described her strategies for cultivating good relationships at work. During the Q&A that followed, a woman in the audience asked a question about combating “imposter syndrome”—the lurking suspicion that you’re a fraud, less able than those around you, and that you’ll eventually be found out.
Rebecca Henderson, CEO of Randstad North America, one of the biggest staffing firms in the country, told me that Gen X women suffering from imposter syndrome have a tendency to “underestimate how hard US companies are working at hiring females and ensuring an equal relationship between men and women. These women have far more power than they think they do.”
Henderson offers this example—one you may have heard before: “An unemployed forty-five-year-old woman, college educated, looks at a job description and thinks, ‘Oh, I think I only have about seventy percent of the skills; I won’t apply.’ A man looks at that same description and thinks, ‘Great, I have fifty percent of the skills; I’ll apply!’ That happens every day.”³⁶
Harris seemed dismayed by the persistence of imposter syndrome, something that dogs men, too: “When I graduated from Harvard Business School thirty years ago, everyone was talking about that.” Harris, a Boomer, ³⁷ told the audience that they needed to believe in themselves. When you’re told by bosses that you’re worthy of a job or a promotion or a trip to a conference like this one, she said: “Trust their judgment. Do not stay down in the valley; there’s too much room at the top of the mountain.”
That same day, in one of the breakout sessions, I met a cheerful blonde woman from Texas born at the tail end of Gen X. She told me she and her husband both worked for the same big company. When their son was born seventeen months earlier, she fell into postpartum depression and was passed over for a promotion while on maternity leave. But she got back in there, did everything the Catalyst speakers were encouraging her to do, and it worked. “It took a year,” she said proudly. “But I got there. I’m now leading my team.”
I congratulated her and asked how she and her husband had sorted out caring for the baby.
Her face fell. I suddenly saw how tired she was. Their baby is in “very expensive daycare,” she said. A lot of it. She and her husband start their day at 6:30 a.m. But the daycare facility doesn’t open that early, so they had to hire a nanny, also expensive, to bridge that time. And they don’t get off work un
til 6:00 p.m.
They can’t afford the pricey Houston real estate market on only one income, so it’s lucky that both of them want to work. They’ve cobbled together a strategy by which they spend a huge amount of money while seeing very little of their baby during the week. She seemed proud of her good work and proud of her baby and incredibly conflicted about the financial and emotional gymnastics required to have both. Some women who “have it all” may see their children awake ninety minutes or less per weekday.
This woman, like so many Gen X women, had always done everything “right.” Good grades. Good job. Good work ethic. And this is where it got her: in a conference room in midtown Manhattan, taking fervent notes on how to get to the top of that mountain where she keeps hearing there is so much room for people like her.
In 1950 only 12 percent of married women with children under the age of six worked.³⁸ After a sharp increase, rates have leveled off since 1990, at about 76 percent.³⁹ Now the question is: how do you work and also do everything else, or very much of anything else?
Claudia Goldin has found that women’s earnings start out being roughly equal to men’s but then diverge as the women start juggling home and family. The solution to this inequity, she writes,⁴⁰ “does not (necessarily) have to involve government intervention and it need not make men more responsible in the home (although that wouldn’t hurt). But it must involve changes in the labor market, especially how jobs are structured and remunerated to enhance temporal flexibility.”
Goldin predicts that the gender gap in pay would be “considerably reduced” and might vanish if firms “did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours.” There’s a rare idea: the private sector could do something to help women—that it’s not just up to us to cultivate sponsors, mentors, or advisers and to demand our place at the table.
Nearly every friend of mine in corporate America has her own tricks for dealing with harassment or condescension, annual reviews, difficult teammates. One, a divorced mother of three, overcomes her shyness and dislike of confrontation by chanting her kids’ names in her head while psyching herself up to ask for an assignment or a raise. If it were just up to her, she says, she’d avoid those conversations, but her children are depending on her income, so she makes herself go into the office and advocate for herself. When it works, she feels triumphant. When it does not, she feels she’s let down not only her children but also all of womankind.
Internalizing the idea that it’s within your power to climb the mountain if only you believe in yourself enough and do the work has led us to the logical conclusion: if you haven’t made it to the mountaintop, what’s wrong with you?
In a 2018 Harvard Business Review summary of research,⁴¹ behavioral scientists wrote that they “fear that Lean In’s main message—which emphasizes individual action as a way to address gender inequality—may lead people to view women as having played a greater role in sustaining and even causing gender inequality.” The more we talk about what women should do, the study’s authors said, the more women tend to be blamed for not fixing it.
The fact is, you can read a hundred books, go to ten conferences a year, take your sponsors out to a dozen coffees a month to pick their brains, but ultimately, unless you’re the boss, you are not in charge of hiring yourself, giving yourself a raise, or making your workplace less toxic or more flexible.
In her book Reset, the diversity activist Ellen Pao says that she once tried to take the advice of Lean In and to claim a seat at the table. It was on a private jet flight with powerful men. She boldly joined their conversation only to discover that it was not about business but about porn stars.⁴² Her conclusion: “Taking your seat at the table doesn’t work so well when no one wants you there and you are vastly outnumbered.”
Michelle Obama put it more bluntly on her 2018 book tour, telling a New York crowd: “That whole ‘so you can have it all.’ Nope, not at the same time. That’s a lie. And it’s not always enough to lean in, because that shit doesn’t work all the time.”⁴³
One major problem seems to be that, as Susan Chira wrote in the New York Times, research “has shown that it’s harder for assertive, ambitious women to be seen as likable, and easier to conclude they lack some intangible, ill-defined quality of leadership.”⁴⁴
The “think leader, think male” mind-set is still common, according to a Catalyst study entitled “The Double-Bind Dilemma for Women in Leadership: Damned If You Do, Doomed If You Don’t.”⁴⁵ Women in the corporate world often are regarded as either too passive or too aggressive, too ambitious or not ambitious enough, too flighty or too off-putting. Add that to the enduring afflictions of sexual harassment, ageism, pregnancy discrimination, and run-of-the-mill lack of power.⁴⁶
A social worker I know loved her workplace. A hardworking and engaged employee, she believed that she might be able to stay there until she retired in a decade or so. Then, without warning, the nursing home where she worked was bought by a big conglomerate. Right away, the bosses started to do things that demoralized the staff: pay cuts, less time for sitting with each patient, uncomfortable uniforms. “I loved that job,” she told me while we stood on the grass under a light rain at her daughter’s college graduation party. “Now it’s a slog.”
In an analysis of Gen X women’s career paths, advertising agency J. Walter Thompson boiled the facts down into a slogan: “Never presume success.”⁴⁷
Director of the Institute for Ethical Leadership at Rutgers University and author of The Working Life,⁴⁸ Joanne B. Ciulla told me that one major irony of modern life is that people tend to identify with their work more than with anything else—an unfortunate inclination now, without job security.
“This is an era when life should be filled with all sorts of rewarding activities,” she said. “Yet many find themselves caught up not only in long hours of work but in debt and suffering from stress, loneliness, and crumbling families.”⁴⁹
A professor for the past forty-three years, Ciulla sees Gen X women in shock from this state of affairs, because, she says, they have credited “the false illusion that all the problems had been solved.
“It used to be amazing to listen to my students,” said Ciulla. “They just had very unrealistic expectations about the gender situation in the world. They’d say, ‘We don’t need feminists anymore. It’s been solved. And feminism turns people off.’ They thought we were crazy old bats.”
By middle age, we can’t help seeing how much inequality still exists.
“So we’re definitely getting our comeuppance now,” I said of Gen Xers who when they were younger dismissed Boomer feminists.
“Yeah, well,” Ciulla said, sounding truly sorry for us. “It’s kind of a sad comeuppance. Being a fifty-year-old woman out of a job is hard. If you’re a professor, you can be old, but in most other jobs, they don’t want old women. The stats hold that up. They have a much harder time getting into the workplace and lower salaries. And often they’re single parents.”
Is there no hope?
“I’ll give you one hopeful thing,” Ciulla said. “And that is the fact that more than fifty-six percent of college graduates are women. Eventually, women will start catching up, because they will be more qualified.”
Many experts have told me that CEOs must commit to building a fair culture, and there must be metrics in place for judging performance in place of a gut feeling about someone being a good guy (in which case you hire an awful lot of guys). If diversity were another measure of an executive’s success and were judged alongside sales, things could change quickly.⁵⁰
One lawyer who does work on diversity and equal rights in corporate America told me she is often asked what companies should do to improve things for women and other disenfranchised groups. She has a list of recommendations. Then she told me her honest advice, rarely stated quite so directly, for any company that really wants to create equality: “You should burn this shit down a
nd start over.”
It’s possible, while depressing, that corporate life is not inherently compatible with life-life. To elude problems with the modern workplace, perhaps women should opt for self-employment via entrepreneurship or the so-called gig economy.
According to Freelancers Union founder Sara Horowitz, most freelancers are women. She believes it’s because “the traditional work structure just isn’t working well for them … our lives play out in stages that don’t fit well with a corporate world dominated by men. By our thirties, many women are starting families and struggling with taking time away from the office. By our forties, we’re often hitting the glass ceiling in terms of pay and promotions. By our fifties and sixties, unfortunately, we’re often being ignored altogether.”⁵¹
It’s tough to find good gig-economy statistics.⁵² Contract workers are a diverse group, including day laborers, musicians, and consultants. But a conservative summary of the research puts the proportion of workers who are currently full-time freelancers at 11 percent.⁵³ Some experts predict that half the workforce will be freelance by 2020.⁵⁴
Making your own schedule, working for yourself, “doing what you love”—especially when contemplated from an office cubicle—can seem like all upside. You become your own boss, and the sky is the limit.
Last year, I accepted an invitation to appear at a conference where I would listen to entrepreneurial attendees’ spiels and give them advice on pitching their projects to the press. I would receive $250 to be there for a few hours, and I believed I would be useful. Having worked at magazines on and off since the early 1990s, I felt confident that I could give them advice on what to do and not do.
What I did not know is that a huge number of those pitching that year were aspiring life coaches. The stories I heard from many of them were ghastly: One told me she had eight family deaths and five miscarriages in one year. Another said her child was abducted. Several had survived domestic abuse or cancer. These experiences made them want to transform their lives, to help people, and so they had become empowerment speakers. They were following their passions. But it was unclear to me how these passions would result in the paying of bills.